In September 2025, Lucy Hutyra got a phone call with some bad news. The National Institute of Standards and Technology was ending a program that had funded her research for more than a decade.
“It was an amazing collaboration,” said Hutyra, a climate scientist at Boston University who studies greenhouse gases in cities. “I remember very vividly getting the phone call, just saying, ‘I’m sorry.’ All of the grants in that program were terminated, and that entire group was disbanded.”
Hutyra flew to the agency headquarters in Maryland. Over a few days, she dismantled years of research — pulling sensors from the field and instruments from the building.
“We piece by piece started taking things apart,” she said. “It was just grim.”
Hutyra, a MacArthur “genius” fellow, used to oversee 13 graduate students; now she’s down to four. She won’t take on any new Ph.D. students this year or next.
The scientific instruments she removed from the field are packed into bins and boxes, piled in a corner of her lab. She hopes to someday restart that research.
“I can’t bear to take everything apart,” she said.
Scientists across Massachusetts have faced similar setbacks under the second Trump administration. And with the midterm elections set to determine control of Congress, many in the research community are hoping for a federal government more willing to support their work.
“There’s long-standing bipartisan support for science in Congress,” said Glorian Sorensen, a professor emerita at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. “We need to ensure that this becomes a priority once again.”
‘Unusually exposed’
Massachusetts, home to thousands of tech companies and nearly a dozen top research universities, “is unusually exposed to federal science cuts,” said Gretchen Goldman, president and CEO of the Union of Concerned Scientists.
Under the second Trump administration, scientists in the state have lost up to $2.6 billion in federal funding from the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation alone, according to the governor’s office. Federal cuts also curtailed or canceled more than a dozen clinical trials here, impacting thousands of patients.
Universities have been especially hard-hit. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology lost 20% of its federal funding. Boston University, which holds the broadcast license for WBUR, announced a $50 million budget cut and layoffs for fiscal year 2026, due to federal uncertainty and cuts. Harvard has battled the Trump administration for billions in ongoing legal fights over its diversity policies.
“We’ve seen a lot of money pulled out of our research economy, our universities, our academic medical centers, and we expect more over time,” said Eric Paley, the state’s secretary of economic development. “So that’s a really big concern.”
Budget cuts are only part of the damage being done to scientific research, said Goldman; federal agencies have gutted staff, clawed back grants, proposed new rules to give political appointees more sway over research, and stifled certain areas of study, like climate change, transgender health and environmental justice.
“This is deeper, more severe, and faster than anything we saw under the first Trump administration or any other administration before,” she said.
The Trump administration says it’s cutting waste and fraud, and shifting research money to new priorities. A July report from Trump science adviser Michael Kratsios laid out some of the administration’s goals, including dominance in quantum computing, advanced nuclear power and artificial intelligence.
“From day one my administration has taken decisive action to dominate the frontiers of science and technology,” said President Trump at an event this month in Washington, D.C. called “Science: A New Golden Age.”
“We ended DEI for scientific grants from the federal government and we now support only the gold standard of science,” Trump said.
Scientists say it’s common for presidents to steer scientific research funds in new directions. The Biden administration, for instance, worked with Congress to pour hundreds of billions of dollars into renewable energy through the Inflation Reduction Act and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law.
But many scientists say the Trump administration’s changes have been chaotic and confusing; cutting off grants halfway through a project, for instance, or delaying payments until the last minute. Many also bristle at Trump’s dismissal of scientific expertise, like when he calls climate change a “hoax.”
“This level of instability and uncertainty, the lack of support, not prioritizing science, not seeing it as beneficial — I’ve never seen anything like this, ever,” said Sorensen, a researcher for four decades who retired from Harvard this year.
The Trump administration’s policies have led some prominent U.S. scientists to move their labs out of the country. Sorensen is concerned the turmoil may deter the next generation of American scientists as well.
“It creates a lack of a sense of future for many people who would want to go into these fields” she said. Many aspiring or early-career researchers, she said, “now feel that there’s just no future for them.”
Kristen Ammons, a Ph.D. candidate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, uses satellite data to study ecosystem recovery, and said she’d hoped to eventually work at NASA or another federal agency.
“The cuts to federal science have been making that pathway seem both unappealing and also less possible,” she said.
Ammons also said she sees the pipeline for new graduate students narrowing. MIT decreased graduate student enrollment by about 20% this year — that’s around 500 fewer students. The trend is mirrored across Massachusetts campuses.
At UMass Lowell, Daniel Rourke said he expects to receive his Ph.D. in 2027, and “as of right now, we don’t really have the funding to bring on anybody new.”
Rourke works on batteries for long-term energy storage, and soon after Trump came into office, the Department of Energy eliminated the program that supplied much of his lab’s funding.
Rourke said student visa restrictions and anti-immigrant rhetoric also hurt the grad student pipeline at UMass Lowell. Rourke, who serves as vice president of the Graduate Employee Union at the school, said more than half of the Ph.D. students there are international.
Trump administration officials argue that new visa rules prevent students from abusing the immigration system. Rourke has a different view.
“I cannot think of a combination of policies that could more effectively destroy the U.S.’s prestige in [research and development] than cutting funding and the attacks on immigration that the Trump administration is doing right now,” Rourke said.
‘Generational harm’
The current Republican-controlled Congress has pushed back on some of Trump’s budget cuts to science. But many scientists say they hope a new Congress could restore stability to federal agencies and get stalled grant money out the door. And Democrats like Massachusetts Congresswoman Katherine Clark are making that pitch to voters.
“If we continue with the cuts that we’ve seen, the attacks that we’ve seen, we are going to suffer generational harm as a country,” Clark said at a recent town hall in Arlington focused on federal science cuts.
Clark represents the state’s 5th Congressional District, which covers many towns north and west of Boston, and is running unopposed for reelection. She serves as House minority whip and is positioned to become House majority leader if the Democrats win the House in November.
She said if Democrats win control of Congress, they can take steps to get research funds flowing.
“When we win, we have the gavels, we have subpoena power, and we can halt this,” she said, “and that is exactly what we’re going to do if we are in the majority.”
Congress can hold hearings, subpoena documents, sue the executive branch or impeach the president — all tactics used by both parties in the past, with varying degrees of success. And while the Trump White House has proved adept at maneuvering around Congress, Democrats pledge to push back.
“We are the place where all the appropriations begin. We can insist that the money be spent. We can hold them to account when it’s not being spent,” said Congressman Jim McGovern, a Democrat representing the 2nd Congressional District in central Massachusetts and running unopposed for reelection.
“Congress is not currently serving as a check. That’ll change, if Democrats are in control,” he said.
McGovern said that for him, the fight over scientific research is personal. His daughter suffered from a rare cancer and benefited from a clinical trial. A year and a half ago, she died at age 23.
“I know the value of these clinical trials. I know the value of medical research,” he said. “And I believe that, maybe with a little bit more research, she could still be with us.”
McGovern noted that many of his Republican colleagues in Congress also support science but have been reluctant to stand up to President Trump. He hopes that might change after the midterms.
But even so, he said it’ll take time to build back what’s been taken apart.
This article was originally published on WBUR.org.
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